A woman from Colorado recently filed a lawsuit claiming that she developed an unmanageable gambling addiction that ruined her life after she started Abilify treatment. As reported by The Daily Beast, Lucy started taking her medication shortly after she had to witness her father’s suicide by cop after taking several hostages in a supermarket. After 25 years of happy marriage, the badly traumatized woman was treated with a pharmaceutical cocktail that included aripiprazole together with several other medications. As soon as she started taking the new prescription, however, Lucy claims she started feeling “disconnected” and rapidly grew an insatiable hunger for gambling that eventually led her to lose a significant amount of money. Her addiction forced her into pawning her husband’s automotive tools as well as her unemployment checks while she kept wasting all her family’s economical resources into casinos and lottery scratchers. The woman is accusing the pharmaceutical companies who manufacture Abilify of the damage she sustained, and decided to seek compensation in court by filing a dispute.
Aripiprazole is an atypical antipsychotic medicine used to treat schizophrenia and Tourette’s syndrome which is also often prescribed for other psychiatric conditions such as depression and bipolar disorder. However, this prescription drug has been associated with a risk of compulsions and addictions. Patients who took it often felt the irresistible urge to indulge in aberrant and often self-destructive behaviors that led them into shopping addiction, compulsive gambling, hypersexuality or binge eating. All those abnormal behaviors usually subside as soon as the medication is stopped. Despite the fact that European and Canadian regulatory agencies already warned doctors and patients about this risk, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) waited for several years before a label change was issued.
Plaintiffs all over the country already joined a vast mass tort action claiming that aripiprazole is a defective drug and that the manufacturer knew about its flaws and voluntarily concealed them. Attorneys allege Bristol-Myers and Otsuka failed to adequately warn the public about the purported medication’s dangers, despite their aggressive marketing tactics that underestimated its potential hazards.
On November 2016, the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML) consolidated more than 40 Abilify lawsuits filed by patients who alleged the antipsychotic drug triggered several compulsive behaviors and caused them to lose thousands of dollars due to gambling addiction. The cases have been centralized in the Northern District of Florida, presided by Chief Judge M. Casey Rodgers who will oversee the Multidistrict Litigation against Bristol-Myers Squibb and Otsuka Pharmaceutical. After an Initial Case Management Conference, the court of Pensacola found that several facts and witnesses concerning the current litigation were overlapping, and consolidated all the claims under the upcoming MDL No. 2734.
Article by Dr. Claudio Butticè, Pharm.D.
